Archive for the ‘cost effectiveness’ Category

Save USD and CAD currency exchange fees in TD Waterhouse RRSP Accounts

Friday, January 13th, 2012

Happy New Year!

This is only indirectly related to Perceptus Solutions Inc., but it is relevant to one of our pet peeves, currency exchange costs for a Canadian. Perceptus is in an awkward situation, because of our web site revenues, and our web advertising, a lot of our revenues and expenses are in US funds. And every time that an exchange happens, we lose, and banks or other financial companies win.

Recently, when logged into my personal TD Waterhouse account, I saw one of those little internal banner ads that mentioned that they have an automatic US Sweeps Service to minimize currency exchange costs in your RRSP account. All it took was a quick call to the TD Waterhouse 1-800 number, to enroll. The folks on the phone refer to this as their “TD Waterhouse Automatic FX Wash Service”. This service will take your US dollars from USD stock sales and put them into a US Money Market fund. Later, when you need USD, it will automatically take USD from the MM fund, before taking any remaining amount from your CAD balance.

Let’s do some math. I’m not sure what the rate TD Waterhouse charges, but most institutions that I’ve used charge at least 1% over the exchange rate as a fee for doing a currency exchange. If you convert $1000 a year in your RRSP every year for 10 years, that’s $10,000 converted. The exchange fees of that, at 1%, would be $100. If you were a more active user, for a longer period of time… say, $10,000 a year in sales of USD stock, and you did this for 30 years, you would save $3,000 (plus compounding).

Start the new year off right and save a few bucks on your financial services. I have no idea which RRSP providers have similar features.

Minimizing Data and Voice Costs when Travelling to Europe

Saturday, June 18th, 2011

I’ve recently returned to Vancouver after a trip to Europe – a couple days in Barcelona and a Western Mediterranean cruise on the Carnival Magic.

I try to avoid using Fido’s atrociously priced international roaming for voice and data.

Here’s a rough overview of the system that I’ve pieced together:

  • I carried my iPhone with me and left it on. Technically, I was roaming, but I had no intention of receiving or making phone calls except in emergencies.
  • Data roaming on the cellphone was also off.  I considered buying the roaming data package, but $50 for 10MB of data seemed a bit steep. In hindsight, it’s not a horrific rate if I could somehow make sure only email was being downloaded.
  • Before leaving, I unconditionally forwarded all voice calls to voice mail.  With some cell providers, if you are roaming and you choose not to answer a phone call, the call will route back to your cellphone provider and you are charged roaming rates while someone leaves you a voice mail. I don’t think this currently applies to Fido; however, I wasn’t about to take the chance. Besides, I didn’t want my phone ringing during the middle of the night (I was, after all, in European time zones).
  • I instructed people to text message me if there was anything critical.
  • I have rules in my mailbox to forward emails that are critical (like our web servers being offline) to Fido’s email to SMS address, e.g. 604nnnnnnn@fido.ca.  These are actually active rules at all times, not just when I’m travelling.
  • Of course, the normal voice mail SMS notifications would get sent to me too.
  • With my cellphone on and technically roaming, I would receive the most important messages.  Receiving text messages while roaming is supposed to be free on Fido. I haven’t checked my invoice yet, but I’ve done this successfully for previous trips.
  • Interestingly, modern cruise ships have satellite based cellphone service, so even in the middle of nowhere, I could receive these text messages.
  • Internet access on board the ship is a pricey $0.75 per minute.  This was OK for briefly viewing email, but I wasn’t too comfortable using this too often.
  • On dry land, if I had some time to spare, I would look for WiFi.  At some ports, I stumbled upon Internet cafes.  But, much more common in Europe, as opposed to China, is a WiFi enabled coffee shop. With WiFi, I could download  email for offline review.  Internet cafe pricing was less than a few dollars per hour, which compared to the on-ship pricing, is roughly equivalent to free.
  • For voice calls, on the iPhone I used the 3CXPhone VOIP App with a Voip.ms account to make ridiculously cheap phone calls. I set these up prior to travel. Even while in Vancouver, this combination is useful for making cheap long distance calls on an iPhone while on WiFi – in theory, I can make VOIP calls on 3G; however, it hasn’t worked too well in my limited testing.  There’s either too much lag or too little bandwidth.

All in all, for me, the iPhone was a great tool to have when travelling, even if you don’t plan on paying for pricey roaming voice or data.  This obviously only works if you have similar needs to me – I didn’t really want to be connected, but I did want to know of anything critical.

Also useful for the iPhone was the CityMaps2Go App which had offline maps for nearly every city that I was in – perhaps I’ll post about that separately some day.  Evernote and Dropbox were also useful, but make sure that you use the flagging features to make the files and notes that you need available offline!

Easy Online Credit Card Donations for Canadian Charities

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

A couple months ago, Ed at Plum mentioned CanadaHelps.org to me.  He was researching payment taking options for one of the charities that he works with.

CanadaHelps is a great site that makes it easy for small charities to take credit card donations.   Just this week my sister was looking for a way for a registered charity for which she volunteers to take credit card payments, and this was my best suggestion.

From their own about page: “CanadaHelps, a public charitable foundation (896568417RR0001), is Canada’s only donation portal that provides access to all of Canada’s 80,000 charities, from national organizations like national cancer charities to smaller groups like local animal shelters and soup kitchens. ”

They’ve taken the publicly available list of all Canadian registered charities and pre-populated their website.   Every charity has a generic landing page with the basic information from the CRA, such as name, address, phone number, etc.  A charity can create a login to customize their information to further detail.

All that CanadaHelps takes for accepting a credit card donation and forwarding it to the charity is 3-4% off the top, this is inclusive of all the credit card company fees (e.g. Visa and MasterCard).  All-in-all it’s great for the charity because of costs and ease of use.

Taking credit card payments is not easy, nor free.  For example, our web based revenues from print-bingo.com and PapayaPolls.com are on the margins for where it would justify the effort and cost of getting a merchant account.  Thus, we still use a PayPal account.  We would be lucky to setup a  merchant account with someone like Moneris for less than $50/month, and the discount rate would only be slightly better than we get at PayPal’s – we probably would not get much below 3% as a discount rate. Plus, we would have to spend hours writing our own payment pages.  We keep putting it off.

For a charity with limited time resources and modest expectations of taking donations by credit card, I highly recommend looking into CanadaHelps.org.

So BC is harmonizing PST and GST in 2010

Friday, July 24th, 2009

Yipee!  The Provincial Government and the Federal Government of Canada have worked out a deal to harmonize the PST and GST.

I’ve hated the PST ever since Perceptus Solutions Inc. has had collect and remit PST  (Wow, Perceptus is more than 5 years old!).  For the uninitiated, PST is intimidating to understand, and bothersome to put into practice.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about how much companies will save by harmonizing the PST.  It is absolutely not true that companies will save 7% of their expenses.  It is a topic for another day, but I list some things that Perceptus does and does not do with PST below, and it’ll make it clear that we do not magically gain 7% net profit.  However, many companies will save a lot.  But, more importantly, there’s less paperwork to handle, fewer regulations to puzzle over, and fewer phone calls to the Province to try and figure out what is exempt or not exempt.  This means that BC based businesses can spend more time creating, building, and improving themselves to do things better, cheaper, and faster – things which will help all BC residents in hard to measure ways in the hazy future.

For those who have never  dealt with PST  behind the scenes, I can tell you from both personal experience, that the experiences of some of our customers, that PST has always been a royal pain compared to the GST.

GST in practice: We get charged GST. We charge GST.  We remit the net amount to Ottawa.

  • Perceptus is charged GST on almost all of  our inputs, the ADSL that resell under the IvyDSL.com banner, our computer gear, office supplies, cellphones, automobile expenses, etc.
  • Similarly, we  charge GST on everything we sell to Canadian companies and individuals.  However, our business customers don’t really care, because they also claim GST inputs to net out their GST payments.
  • We send to the federal government the difference between what we collected and what we paid in GST.  It’s easy to calculate, and we’re indifferent to whether GST goes up or down, it just doesn’t significantly affect our bottom line – we just collect on behalf of the government.

PST on the other hand: We sometimes get charged by suppliers. We sometimes don’t get charged.  We sometimes charge our customers. We sometimes don’t charge.  Often, both scenarious are on a single invoice!  We remit to Victoria whatever we happened to charge.  “Huh?” is right.

  • Perceptus is charged PST on some of the things we need to run the business.
    • ADSL that we resell: Excluded.  We are a reseller; however, we had to send documentation of such.  But, any lines we use for our own purposes, we have to calculate separately and self-assess PST.
    • Most gear, and supplies: Charged.  Paper, computers, coffee, cellphones, etc.  The more we use, the higher our PST expenses, and the higher our costs.  That all get’s figured into the prices we quote to our customers.
    • Some, but not all service providers would be charged PST too.  We don’t use many outside services, so I won’t elaborate too much.
  • Perceptus charges our customers on some things but not others.
    • ADSL, under our IvyDSL.com banner, we do charge our customers PST.
    • Website subscriptions and our packaged software are charged PST.
  • Perceptus does not have to charge for other items
    • If we write a custom report, setup a network, design a webpage or other “custom” work, it’s a service, and there’s no PST.
    • Further, if we were to write a custom tool to work with one of our packaged items, e.g. an enhanced feature for Bean Counting, our inventory counting system, we would not have to charge PST on the custom work, but we would have to charge PST on the “packaged” software.
    • If for some reason we were to wholesale a product, we wouldn’t need to charge PST, but we’d need to track our reseller’s PST info.

The list goes on.  It’s maddening.

Yes, harmonizing the PST will initially cause the price of some items to go up for consumers.  Yes, some industries will be negatively affected, such as restaurants.  Yes, I think the provincial government is doing a bit of a tax grab here – I believe other provinces reduced the total harmonized tax by at least a percent when they moved to the HST.  But overall, HST is not a bad thing – granted, we’re  fortunate to be on the side that generally benefits from the HST.   I suspect that the province will try and tip tax revenues back towards businesses from consumers a bit by adjusting personal and corporate income taxes – or at least they should, because the consumers are clearly taking a hit on the HST.

At Perceptus, I’m  just glad to have less regulation to wrap my  head around.  And as a taxpayer, I’m glad that the provincial government has less paperwork to process.